There’s a different feeling around the Lions in head coach Dan Campbell’s fourth season than there was in his first three years on the job.
Campbell inherited a team that won 14 games over the previous three seasons and expectations were predictably low for his debut. The Lions lived up to those expectations, but created some hope going in Year Two and the team won nine games while just missing the playoffs. That led to even more optimism last year and a breakthrough run to the NFC Championship Game.
The hopefulness of those offseasons has been replaced by the opposite of the expectations that greeted Campbell on his arrival. The Lions have set the bar for themselves as one o the best teams in the league and that leaves them with a lot more downside possibilities than upside ones for the first time in the coach’s tenure. Campbell said the team is comfortable in that spot because they still have things to accomplish.
“I think our guys know where we’re at,” Campbell said, via Jonathan Jones of CBSSports.com. “I would say this: the motivator is we still have things that we circle, too. We have our own shitlist. So we’re the team with the target on our back, but we’ve circled some people too now. We have targets, too. It’s not like we just ran through everybody last year and blew everybody out. We had losses and tough games. We have division opponents. We lost in the NFC Championship Game. So we’ve got our own targets man. And that’s the motivator.”
Campbell has outlined what he thinks the Lions need to do to knock off those targets and it will be an enjoyable season in Detroit if they prove to be as adept at reaching those goals as the ones they set in his first three years.
